[OSM-talk] A message to our friends at HOT, Peace Corps etc. about Changeset Comments

[Blake Girardot]

On 11/19/2015 3:58 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Of course you are also right when you say that HOT instructions do
> sometimes clash with our usual quality expectations (I remember a recent
> discussion about tagging "village greens" so that these can be
> interpreted as helicopter landing sites or so). I think we were mostly
> ok with this at the time when Haiti disaster mappers used
> leisure=camping_ground to make refugee camps appear on the standard map;
> such "crypto tagging" must, of course, remain an emergency measure and
> not something we do regularly because it is easier.

This is another example where HOT took this advice about leisure=commons 
as well as aeroway=helipad and immediately modified how it asked 
contributors to tag things, clarified what should be tagged 
leisure=commons and aeroway=helipad and went through and reviewed every 
item that was tagged that way in Nepal (the context of the discussion at 
the time) and either revised how it was tagged or removed what we agreed 
was probably questionably tagged.

We also actively avoid making claims of "emergency measures" for tagging 
(or anything mapping related really), local context for tagging meanings 
is different, but we have been making efforts to always make sure our 
tagging fits the spirit of OSM tags we use and where that is not 
possible, try and develop consistent useful tags that do meet our needs 
and are maintainable. Admittedly sometimes that is a bit ad hoc.

Anyway, as I have said, we always want to work with the OSM community to 
either use the tags in a way that everyone understands and accepts or 
develop tags for things that are appropriate for OSM. Can we do better? 
For sure. Are we trying to do better and have we improved? Also for sure.

Thank you for bringing these things up Frederik, it helps HOT and OSM.

cheers,
Blake